"I'm writing to inform you that the release team discussed Drop or Fix Fallback Mode yesterday. We've come to the conclusion that we can't maintain fallback mode in reasonable quality, and are better off dropping it." Gnome-fallback has been my refuge, as I find both Unity and Gnome 3's shell unusable. Yes, we have been warned this would happen. I thought the cost of maintaining gnome-panel would be so low that it might never need to happen. But as it appears, it is deemed necessary. As for me, I'm bound for something Qt, as I am very angry at Gnome for abandoning its 'classic' users.

With today's computers, RAM usage is not an issue, that's why we have 64-bit however of course, let's not go insane.

Anyway, the point of my post is simple things such as drag and drop work flawlessly without a hitch in TDE. I was able to drag/drop GTK and other toolkit icons including the URL icons of web sites from Firefox, Opera, Konqueror (and Chromium I think) from the address bar to the panel in the quick launch. I was also able to drag any icon (folder or non-folder) from any file manager I tried (Qt and non-Qt) to the quick launch. Regardless what toolkit the program I used is written with, (definitely not Qt), drag and drop just worked happily with TDE. I cannot say the same with some other desktop environments that we have today.

These features to me are basics for desktop computing and should not be omitted in anyway. Of course, re-arranging icons by left clicking an icon on the panel and dragging the cursor also worked without a hitch while the space between icons is equality adjusted and allocated for you automatically such as other icons being repositioned equally. Also, the size of the icons on the panel is always the same - width and height. You have all this with TDE.

Today's other desktop environments lack aesthetics and common sense and whenever I use any of them, I feel like I am sitting upside down and try to use a computer.

Also with the latest TDE, you can convert the panel launch menu into the same one as in KDE 4. It is truly disappointing that major distributions ignore TDE superiority by not creating a TDE based version of their distribution.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but it is the same reasons they dropped XMMS(1.x) or any other top GTK1 apps. It is not because they were not getting the job done anymore, but because of how hard they were to maintain. The TDE guy have to support over 10 million lines of code. Everytime something change and break compatibility, it have to be fixed. Every GCC version that change default settings and break compilation, it have to be fixed. Everytime upstream libraries bump API levels it have to be ported or removed. Scale that to 10 million lines of code and maintenance/packaging/support is not cost effective. It is that simple. It also serve a very small niche. Unless the maintainer is very motivated, TDE will get to a point where it will be impossible to maintain without forking even more libraries and making the problem even bigger.

TDE should have forked KDE 3.7 or 3.8, not 3.5. At least 3.7/3.8 were ported to Qt4, but it was before KDE4 features were merged in. It would have allowed to keep only the KDesktop and Kicker (possibly the old Konqueror and Kontact too) while enjoying upstream support of the base libraries and ability to blend in KDE4 apps when the new version is simply better, aka, Kate, Konversation, Digikam, KDenlive.

Well you see, Timothy should not have to do this but unfortunately he does because there is no coherence between toolkits. The foundation of every toolkit is different! There should be like a central protocol where all developers can turn to and follow.

If what you said is true, it means that the functionality I specified is hard-coded to handle various different messages from different toolkits but this is not Timothy's fault and he should be praised for this because he tries to at least cover, lower the extent of the mess created by other developers!

With Windows, based on my own experience, regardless if the program looks like Office XP (super flat buttons), Office 95 (3D), Office 97 (flat) or is using the Ribbon UI, they all follow the same rules.

- Every window has a Window Procedure
- Every window receive the same messages: WM_ACTIVATE, WM_LBUTTONDBLCLK, WM_KEYDOWN ... you name it because they all derive from the same object.

This is why everything works with Windows because there is one central foundation to everything that's running and they are all related to particular objects following the same rules.

From what I have experienced, X.ORG does not have these rules and that's why everything is broken and nothing is compatible with each and even toolkits themselves are not compatible with each other with different versions. It's a joke but this can be fixed. Put everything in the past and start-over, create a protocol or if starting over is bad then take one toolkit and make it official and then everyone can use the same toolkit and improve it.